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Second lawsuit filed in data-rigging case

Columbus school attendance scandal

Columbus City Schools employees -- and perhaps others in schools throughout the state -- are accused of falsifying students' records to improve their schools' standing on state report cards. Read the complete series.

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Another parent has sued several current and former Columbus school district leaders, saying the
district’s “pattern of corrupt activity” has hurt his daughter.

Jonathan Beard filed the civil suit on Monday in Franklin County Common Pleas Court on behalf of
his daughter, Kailey. He is the second parent to sue the district during its student-data scandal.
The first suit was filed in November by the parent of a former Medina Middle School student.

Beard filed the lawsuit himself without an attorney. Beard says the district manipulated student
data to falsely improve the academic standing of East High School. The higher academic rating meant
his daughter, who is assigned to attend East, was not eligible to use a private-school voucher. To
use a voucher under Ohio’s EdChoice program, students must be assigned to a low-performing
school.

The district’s internal auditor found that East was among the schools that improperly withdrew
students who weren’t actually gone from school, which would have allowed the school to toss out
their test scores and attendance records. Beard did not want Kailey to go to East, so he sent her
to a charter school her freshman year. As a sophomore, he began paying for her to attend Bishop
Hartley High School. He’s seeking monetary compensation because he thinks she should have been able
to use a voucher to go there.

“My family was harmed. We were financially harmed. We informally approached (the district) and
asked them to make us whole, and they rejected that,” Beard said yesterday.

District spokesman Jeff Warner said in an email that Beard’s lawsuit is “without merit” and that
the district plans to make that case.

The suit names Superintendent Gene Harris, each school-board member and Columbus City Council
President Andrew J. Ginther, a former school board member. It also names other district employees
who have been named as central to years of data-rigging in the district. Among them are Steve
Tankovich, who is said to have masterminded the effort, and former administrators who oversaw
student data.

Beard said he didn’t join the other parent’s lawsuit, which seeks to become a class-action suit,
because it didn’t specifically address the denial of access to a voucher.

Like the plaintiff in the other lawsuit, though, Beard is asking the court to force the district
to submit accurate data to the Ohio Department of Education. He also wants the defendants to stop
denying that data has been submitted incorrectly already.

Ginther is a target of the suit because he was in a position to stop the data manipulation in
2004 when he was a school-board member and received an anonymous tip about data tampering, Beard
said. He didn’t do enough to check out the claims, Beard said.

Ginther’s spokesman said he hadn’t read the suit and couldn’t comment.